For many years, attempts have been made to develop improved systems for picking up individual articles from a conveyor or similar conveyor system and depositing those articles within a container, such as a corrugated cardboard box. The desire is to accomplish this task with speed and accuracy. To meet the demand for speed, past solutions have used multiple robots along the conveyor, such as described in Applicant's U.S. Pat. No. 6,540,063, which is incorporated herein by reference. Often, if four such robot heads are used, each head picks up every fourth article on the conveyor system in a staggered manner so that the four robot heads effectively remove four consecutive articles during each iteration. While this multiplicity of heads increases the packing speed, the means for moving the robot heads from the conveyor system to the container may be awkward or cumbersome to implement.
To provide greater flexibility, multi-axis robots have been developed for picking an article off of a common conveyor. Many such multi-axis robots, however, have proven to be fairly slow and heavy. Hence, while such robots may provide greater flexibility in motion, they have also provided a need for an even greater number of robots to meet the speed requirements in the marketplace today. Additionally, it has been found that with some three-axis robots, the range of movement may be limited in certain directions. For example, certain three-axis robots are very limited in their vertical component, which can make movement of an article from a conveyor into a deep container difficult to perform.
To provide even greater flexibility, multi-axis robots as disclosed in Applicant's U.S. Pat. No. 7,644,558 and U.S. Pat. No. 8,997,438, which are fully incorporated herein by reference, can be used for picking an article off of a common conveyor and placing the article in a container. The multi-axis robot can provide the desired speed of operation with the desired range of movement and can accurately pick articles from the conveying system and place them into containers.
Even with the improvements made so far in case packing, operators are continually striving for faster and more efficient systems for packing articles from a conveyor into containers. Operators are also striving to implement these systems in a manner that meets “shelf-ready packaging” (SRP) or “retail-ready packaging” (RRP) requirements. SRP and RRP generally refer to the preparation of a product that is delivered to a retailer in a ready-to-self merchandised unit. For example, SRP and RRP products can be easily placed on a shelf without the need for unpacking or repacking. In that regard, SRP and RRP products may be packaged in containers that allow the container to be shipped, stacked, and opened on a pallet in a manner that allows the product to be displayed in the opened container in an isle on the floor of a retail outlet. For example, SRP and RRP products may be packaged in a container in an upright or vertical position, aligned in one or more rows within the container, such that the product brand or name, and/or contents, can be seen while the product remains in the container.